Evolver 117 - September and October 2020

4 LOCKDOWN 2020 Monday 23rd March, a seemingly random unimportant date in every other year but in 2020 it marks something utterly without precedent: a total lockdown of everything and everyone in the UK apart from essential services. It is having a catastrophic effect on the arts. A domino effect of closures, of people confined within the walls of their living spaces, resulted in an eerily quiet world punctuated only by birdsong and the sound of rain. It was for many people a time of tragedy too, of loneliness, of missing loved ones, and crucially for those involved in the arts, fear for the future in terms of income, even survival. Many self-employed artists slipped through the net of government support or were not doing jobs that were eligible for the furlough scheme. Some galleries and museums saw the closures coming and acted quickly. The ROYAL WEST OF ENGLAND ACADEMY in Bristol shut on 17th March, its newly opened Wilhelmina Barns-Graham exhibition deprived of even a private view. Within days Barns-Graham’s beautiful works were shrouded in brown paper. An image that for me encapsulated what had happened. The HOLBURNE MUSEUM in Bath, site of the recently opened exhibition by Grayson Perry, which I featured in the last edition of Evolver in March, shut its doors on the same day. The good news is that both venues were able to re-open, and due to the flexibility of the lenders they were able to make these two important exhibitions available to the public beyond their original end date. For the RWA the closure came at a potentially catastrophic time, as they finalised funding for their capital building works, the Light and Inspiration project. They were due to close for six months in 2021 in order for the works to be completed, so the unplanned closure necessitated a hasty reordering of the future exhibition programme and uncertainty about whether their annual open exhibition could be staged. The only way they could survive was to take up the furlough scheme. Director Alison Bevan said: “Trying to survive in an organization that relies on earned income and gets less that 1.5% of its costs from the public purse continues to be very challenging. As a charity we still had to fulfil our charitable aims of supporting the most vulnerable in society through creativity. We were very grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council for enabling us to keep some of our activities going.” GRAYSON PERRY ‘CLAIRE AS A SOLDIER’ (Holburne Museum, Bath, until 3 January)